Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/437

 the ground blushed with flowers; and the wattled cote and its woolly tenants were of an exquisite pastoral beauty. But I looked again, and it proved to be no living flock, but beautiful sculpture.' The lady, thinking this a capital holiday-show for her children, eagerly interposed, 'I beg pardon? Mr. Blake, but may I ask where you saw this?' ' Here, madam,' answered Blake, touching his forehead. The reply brings us to the point of view from which Blake himself regarded his visions. It was by no means the mad view those ignorant of the man have fancied. He would candidly confess they were not literal matters of fact; but phenomena seen by his imagination: realities none the less for that, but transacted within the realm of mind. A distinction which widely separates such visions from the hallucinations of madness, or of the victims of ghostly or table-turning delusions; and indicates that wild habit of talk (and of writing) which startled outsiders to have been the fruit of an excessive culture of the imagination, combined with daring licence of speech. No man, by the way, would have been more indifferent or averse than he (wide and tolerant as was his faith in supernatural revelations) towards the table-turning, wainscot-knocking, bosh-propounding 'Spiritualism' of the present hour; the gross and puerile materialism which tries to pass itself off for its eternal opposite. He might not have disbelieved in the 'communications' in question; but they would not, in his eyes, have seemed worth attending to, or as proceeding from a higher world at all:—only, perhaps, as the witless pranks of very ignoble spirits from a lower one. 'Blake never dreamed of questioning the correctness of his impressions,' to borrow Mr. Smetham's sagacious and discriminating words,—'To him all thought came with the clearness and veracity of vision. The conceptive faculty working with a perception of outward facts, singularly narrow and imperfect, projected every idea boldly into the sphere of the actual. What he thought, that he saw to all intents and purposes. It was this sudden and sharp crystallisation of inward notions into